


Tangling

by earlybloomingparentheses



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: F/M, M/M, No Mary Erasure, Non-monogamous Relationship, Post-Season/Series 03, Relationship Negotiation, Unconventional Families
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-11
Updated: 2014-11-11
Packaged: 2018-02-25 00:43:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2602313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/earlybloomingparentheses/pseuds/earlybloomingparentheses
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I’m going to say this straight out. You’re not going to like it, but I’m going to say it anyway. What you have with Sherlock, John. It’s not finished. It’s never going to be finished, and you need to deal with that.”</p>
<p>In which they are all tangled up in each other, and maybe that's how it should be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tangling

Sherlock is dreaming again.

John’s never known him to have nightmares, not like this. Before—before _everything_ , really, before Moriarty and the fall and Mary and Magnussen—Sherlock slept like the dead. John was the one who woke up gasping, choking under the desert sun with gunfire exploding in his ears, and Sherlock was the one who rolled over, still half asleep, and pulled him into his chest, safe. _Safe_. That’s something John never realized he felt with Sherlock until suddenly he didn’t. Until Sherlock died, and then came back.

“John,” Sherlock mumbles in his sleep, his voice agonized. He twitches violently. His hands curl tightly into fists. “John— _John—_ ”

Neither of them feels safe now. John would like to blame that on Moriarty’s message, broadcast two weeks ago now and not repeated since; he’d like to blame the psychopath who first broke them apart for the way he feels now, like the ground is shifting constantly beneath him, but that’s not right. The possibility that Moriarty is still out there somewhere is terrifying, of course it is, but it’s not what’s making Sherlock gasp and writhe and twist himself up in the blankets.

“Shhhhhh,” John says softly. “Shhhhhh.” Ever so gently, he moves his hand to Sherlock’s head, smoothing down his soft dark hair. “I’m here, Sherlock. It’s John. I’m here.”

Sherlock kicks, shudders, whines.

“It’s John, Sherlock. I’m here. I’m here, Sherlock. It’s John. I’m still here.” He pauses, breathes. “ _You’re_ still here.”

Two weeks: two weeks since Sherlock shot Magnussen, since he left on a plane to what John now knows was almost certainly a fatal mission. Two weeks since the plane turned around and returned him from death a second time. Two weeks since he and John picked up the tangled threads of whatever mess they had left at the foot of a gleaming black gravestone two years back.

 “John,” Sherlock gasps, sitting bolt upright in bed, clutching the sheets.

“I’m here,” John says, his voice breaking. “Sherlock, I’m here.” 

Sherlock turns to him, eyes glistening wet in the moonlit bedroom, and reaches out blindly. For a second his pale hand seems to float, grasping, desperate and disembodied. For a second, John watches it, immobilized with doubt; and then he pulls Sherlock against his body, whispering nothings into his hair, inhaling his scent and holding him so tightly that both of them can barely breathe.

 

 

 

_Two weeks ago_

“This has gone on long enough, John.”

Mary’s voice is firm and quiet. John doesn’t look up from his knees. He’s still having trouble with the whole air-in-and-out process. Sherlock flying away, Sherlock flying back, Sherlock being whisked off to deal with Moriarty who is apparently also not dead…and John is sitting on the concrete ground behind a building on the edge of the airstrip, where dear god hopefully no one can see him because he can’t stand up, not yet, not till his legs start working again.

“John, listen to me.”

He tears his gaze away from his interlaced fingers and looks up at Mary. Her face is patient, sympathetic, but there’s a briskness to her gaze that he recognizes. It’s still amazing to him how well he feels he knows her, even now.

“Mary. Sorry, I—god, sorry, just a bit of a shock…” John struggles to stand but, _Jesus this is embarrassing_ , he can’t manage it quite yet.

“Oh, John.” Mary sighs. She places a hand on her belly and surveys the ground critically, then sighs again and winces her way gingerly down to the concrete.

She takes his hand. 

“I’m going to say this straight out. You’re not going to like it, but I’m going to say it anyway. What you have with Sherlock, John. It’s not finished. It’s never going to be finished, and you need to deal with that.”

John looks at her, shocked, her words hitting him like a punch in the gut.

“I told you, Mary,” he says, his voice suddenly shaking, “I _love you_ —”

She looks less patient now. “I know that,” she replies, clearly trying not to be short with him. “That in no way precludes you from loving him, too. I wasn’t the first, John, and that doesn’t bother me. What does—”

“But it’s you _now_ ,” John interrupts, his heart pounding, his breath coming quick and fast. “I chose _you—_ when he was pretending to be _dead_ —”

“What _does bother me_ ,” Mary says, speaking over him, “is that you can’t truly be here for me, and for the baby, until you face up to the fact that you loved him and he left you and now that he’s back you hate him and you adore him and you can’t decide whether you want to kill him or to take him to bed or both.”

A hot flush works its way up John’s neck, his face. _Shit_ , he thinks urgently, _no, no, she can’t know that, I don’t feel that way, I don’t, I_ won’t. _I love_ her.

“Oh, John.” Mary’s expression softens. “You daft man.” She reaches out and touches his cheek. “I’m not about to give you up, not now I’ve just got you back. I’ll fight Sherlock tooth and nail if it comes to that.” She laughs. “John, darling, I’m not a jealous person. There’s more than enough love in you for both of us. And I wouldn’t mind spending the occasional night alone—you snore, love.”

John gapes at her, unable to process what she’s saying. She smiles at him, and then her face turns serious.

“But I need you to be on firmer ground than you are right now,” she says steadily, placing her hand on her round stomach. “Pretty soon there’s going to be a tiny person you’re partly responsible for, and when you’re with her, you owe it to her to really _be there_.”

John’s head is reeling. “Mary…but…”

“You didn’t marry me because I’m conventional, John,” she says quietly. “Surely that’s clear enough now.”

_Black hat, arcing bullet, ambulance sirens—_ John presses his thumbs to his forehead.

“If you can forgive me,” Mary says, her dark eyes grave, “you can forgive him.”

 

 

 

Mrs. Hudson welcomes him with tea and chatter that he tunes out even more than usual. _There is no way you can be unfaithful to me with him_ , Mary had said that morning, and when he looked at her with eyes wide and helpless and asked _why?_ she merely pressed her lips together and shook her head. Mrs. Hudson flutters ahead of him up the stairs, she’s saying something about Moriarty, but John can’t think about that now and anyway there’s been no news since yesterday. _Sherlock, I…_ John begins in his head, but can’t get any further than that. Mrs. Hudson lets him go, disappears down the stairs, and John pushes open the door, feeling numb.

Sherlock is draped along the sofa, fingers steepled, and _Christ_ , it hits him full on, like it does sometimes, _Sherlock is alive_. John is still so relieved, and so angry, that Sherlock is alive.

“Phone,” Sherlock mutters. John frowns at him, not moving. Sherlock flutters his hand in the direction of the kitchen table. John looks at Sherlock’s mobile and does nothing.

“Mary said we should talk,” he says abruptly, and then shuts his mouth tight. _We should talk,_ what an idiotic opening, god, who is he? He doesn’t _talk_ , he runs, he shoots, he jumps down fire escapes and when he’s not doing that he heals sick people and Sherlock is sitting up, he’s upright on the sofa and his eyes are trained on John.

“ _Oh_ ,” Sherlock says. Nothing more. His body is frozen and his gaze doesn’t waver.

John blinks. He licks his lips and shifts his weight. “Erm.”

“Neither of us deserves her,” Sherlock mutters completely unexpectedly, and then he crosses the floor and is suddenly standing much too close to John.

_Oh, god_. John can feel the warmth coming off Sherlock. “Sherlock, just, just to be clear, Mary and I are still—”

“Of course you are,” Sherlock says impatiently. “I’m not an idiot. God, John, it only makes sense, she’s your spouse, and it’s not as if _I_ want to marry you, so I’m not getting in her way and she’s not getting in mine. Do keep up.”

_What a prick_ , John thinks wonderingly, and _He is_ _so close_. John could just tip his head forward and capture Sherlock’s lips in a kiss—soft at first and then hungry—the first time in two years—

But then Sherlock leans forward and John stumbles back.

They stare at each other.

“I thought—”

“I’m sorry—”

A silence.

“Fuck,” John says abruptly. “I’m not sorry. Fuck you, Sherlock, _you left me_ —”

“You said you forgave me,” he interrupts, and _God_ , those _puppy eyes_.

“Forgiveness manipulated out of me by making me think I was about to _die_ doesn’t _count_ , Sherlock, Jesus, you are the biggest _arse_ —”

“Well you wouldn’t forgive me any _other_ way—”

“No shit, Sherlock, that’s the point, you have to have your way no matter what, and you—you can’t _force_ forgiveness, Jesus—”

“But you’re John, you’re John Watson, you _have_ to forgive me—”

“Do you think that’s who I am?” John explodes. “That John Watson—what, equals Sherlock Holmes somehow, that we’re forever _linked_ , Sherlock Holmes and John Watson—”

“Yes!”

John stops. Sherlock’s face is defiant, earnest. _Sherlock Holmes and John Watson_.

Someone mistook him for Sherlock Holmes, once, a long time ago. Right at the beginning. Even them, his identity was bound up with the detective’s too tightly to be unwound. Of course, that did get him kidnapped.

Didn’t it always?

“Sherlock,” he breathes, and crushes Sherlock’s lips to his.

Sherlock makes a noise halfway between a gasp and a whine and _fuck_ , it’s like kissing lightning, it has always been electric, always too much too fast, Sherlock’s tongue in his mouth and his hands in John’s hair and they’re pressed against the wall and John wants to climb _inside him_ , he can’t fucking breath and Sherlock’s hand is at his belt and John thought he would never feel this again—

“Oh, god,” he gasps, stumbling out of Sherlock’s embrace. He’s shaking. He has to brace himself against the sofa.

“John.” Sherlock looks half desperate, half worried. His hair is mussed and his clothes are rumpled. He looks already ravished, somehow.

“You on the roof,” John spits out. “You on the roof—”

Pure hurt flashes across Sherlock’s face. He’s panting still, looking at John and struggling to breathe. “I was trying to protect you,” he says, and his tone is that of a pleading child.

John closes his eyes.

“I know.”

Slowly, he holds out his hand. “Come here.”

Sherlock comes eagerly, relief evident in his face. But John stops him with a gentle hand on his chest.

“I almost lost you again yesterday, didn’t I?”

Sherlock nods, his face wary.

“I don’t want to live without you, Sherlock,” John confesses, because what the hell, because it’s true, because he’s only just realized Sherlock won’t know that unless he says it.

“ _John_ ,” Sherlock breathes.

And that’s just how John remembers it—the precise way Sherlock says his name when he really means _I love you._

“Take me to bed,” he murmurs, because he isn’t ready, because he’ll never be ready, and it doesn’t matter.

Sherlock does.

 

 

 

“What—”

Molly whips around, her gaze moving from John’s hand on Sherlock’s wrist to Mary’s face, bright and open across the table at the pub. The two men are interviewing the barman about some stolen money or something and the women are talking together, Molly with a pint and Mary with a ginger ale. Mary takes in Molly’s stunned expression and gives her a wry smile.

“It’s all right, Molly. I know.”

Molly’s eyes widen. “That they—that Sherlock and John—they’re—”

“Yes.”

Molly looks as though she doesn’t know whether or not to be outraged, or at whom. “But—you and John—”

“Still together, yes.”

Mary waits as her friend’s face shifts through a number of complicated expressions. The thing about Molly Hooper is that she’s a lot harder to shock than she looks. The thing about Molly Hooper is that she’s one of the sharpest people Mary knows.

“You’re all right with it.”

It’s not a question.

“Yes,” Mary confirms anyway.

“Why?”

Molly’s look is stubborn. She’s one of the most loyal people Mary knows, too, and right now that loyalty is all on Mary’s behalf.

“Oh, my dear.” She squeezes Molly’s hand, suddenly overwhelmingly thankful for her concern. “John asked me that. I couldn’t explain it.”

“Not to him, maybe.” Molly replies mulishly. “Explain it to me.”

Mary sits back and lets her eyes drift over to the two men. John—so tightly wound, so dear, so impossible and angry and yet less so, just a bit, these past few days. Something has got set right in him, something that had been wrong and twisted since before she’d met him. That’s why, Mary could say, because John needed to get set right—and not only for him, but for the baby, and for Mary herself. That’s true, and Mary believes it.

But it’s not the whole story.

Mary’s gaze travels to Sherlock.

“I almost killed him,” she says quietly. Molly knows that—she shouldn’t, really, it’s terribly dangerous for all of them that she does, but she put too many things together not to be told and anyway Mary needs her, needs someone on her side. Molly is devoted to Sherlock and Mary was sure that when she’d shot that bullet she’d killed her budding friendship with Molly, a casualty of a war she never wanted to fight. But Molly had looked and guessed and questioned Mary face-to-face and Mary had told her the truth and after a full five minutes’ silence Molly had nodded and said, _Sometimes you have to do terrible things for the one you love_ , and Mary wondered just how much keeping the secret of Sherlock’s not-death had cost Molly.

“I never meant to really kill him, of course,” (another thing Molly had accepted immediately, loyally, miraculously) “only to injure him to the point where he wouldn’t alert John. I knew if I hit him in just the right spot he’d figure out how to stay alive.” She’d hoped he’d suffer some memory loss, too, but she was ashamed of that now. The truth was an awful thing, but she was glad it was out.

“I know,” Molly says gently, breaking into Mary’s reverie. She glances over at Sherlock and John. “Are you allowing this out of guilt, Mary?”

Mary looks at her, startled and uncomprehending. “Am I…oh, god, no. ‘I almost killed you, so share my husband?’ No, no.”

“What, then?” Molly asks, her chin tilting stubbornly upwards.

Mary sighs and lets it out: “I was in his head.”

She looks over at Sherlock, whose pale angular face and upturned collar serve to mask a brain that Mary has never quite managed to vacate.

“I had to dive in, in a split second, to calculate what he’d calculate, to decide how long it would take him to work out how not to die. So I could determine how close to his heart to shoot.”

She looks quickly at Molly, suddenly uncertain if her friend can handle her talking like this, but Molly looks stoically back, refusing to blink.

“I knew him,” Mary continues, “I knew him well enough to know he was quick, brilliantly quick, but—not until that moment, when I had to put myself in his head, did I understand how little his mind works like—like normal people’s, like John’s, like yours. I mean, you’re smart, both of you, but he’s—”

“A miracle,” Molly finishes.

Mary sips her ginger ale, not looking Molly in the face. “Or a machine.”

“You’re not a machine, Mary.”

She quirks her mouth up in a smile. “No. Of course not.”

“Mary—”

“It’s all right. I only mean that Sherlock’s brain works, on some level, like mine. I don’t see the same kinds of things he sees, I don’t collect the same data, but that damnably quick if-this-happens-this-will-happen-next—that ability to take everything in at once and determine what will unfold—the kind of mind that realizes it’s just been shot and can stop itself from dying in a matter of seconds—”

“Or that can look at a man and realizes how to shoot him and just barely fail to kill him.”

Mary swallows. Molly is placid, still. Unreproachful. Mary looks at Sherlock again, so brilliant and so lonely. When your mind is made like a machine, she thinks, it’s hard not to be lonely.

“Nothing he and my husband do together can hurt me,” Mary says simply. “I’ve been Sherlock Holmes, Molly. I’m still Sherlock Holmes.”

Molly looks at her for a long moment more, and then finally nods.

“Will it make you happy?” Molly asks after a few minutes, during which the music grinds on in the background, couples and groups of friends laugh and spill their beer, and Sherlock gestures wildly at the barman, John looking on with exasperation and fondness.

“I don’t know if anything will make us happy, exactly,” Mary says, without bitterness. “But it will make us better.”

 

 

 

Mycroft is waiting for John in the parking garage, leaning on an umbrella.

“Just like old times,” John comments stiffly as he walks towards the man.

“Mmmm,” Mycroft replies. “I was feeling nostalgic.”

“Right.”

The tension is thick in the air. John hasn’t decided whether to blame Mycroft for shipping Sherlock off in that plane or to thank him for saving Sherlock from a worse fate. Mycroft’s face betrays nothing, but there are lines there that John doesn’t remember.

John has new lines on his face, too.

“I want your word that you’ll keep an eye on him,” Mycroft says bluntly. “I want you to watch him and tell me what he’s doing.”

John barks out a laugh. “You’re joking, right?”

Mycroft’s thin smile has no humour in it whatsoever.

“We’ve done this already, Mycroft, two years ago. My answer then—”

“Was something Sherlock later chided you for,” Mycroft interrupts smoothly. “ _You ought to have taken the money and split it between you_ is what he said. Sherlock knows I’m doing this, John, I have no doubt.”

John feels a twist of confusion. “So…”

“I’m not offering out of brotherly concern this time, I’m afraid. One condition of Sherlock remaining at large while he and I track down Moriarty, or whoever has perpetrated this little scheme, is that Sherlock be watched. He dismantled the cameras I’d planted in his apartment this morning, so I thought I’d take a more direct approach. I want you to sign this contract promising to keep tabs on him. It was quite a task to convince the—the _authorities_ that you were a good solution to our problem, given your loyalty to him, but I told them you’d do anything to stop him being taken away again.”

Mycroft holds out a pen and paper. John stares at him, mind whirring.

“Is this a trick?”

Mycroft does look amused now. “Oh, John. Ever suspicious. No, I’m afraid the days for ‘tricks,’ as you call them, are over.” A shadow passes across his face. “Sherlock’s liberty is hanging by a thread, John. I need your help.”

And damn the man, but John can’t help but believe it. He remembers Sherlock putting a gun to Magnussen’s head, putting Magnussen in his grave to save Mary, to save John and his family. Putting his cards on the table.

It’s time he does the same.

“Fine,” he says, giving a sharp nod. “You’re right. I’ll do anything to protect Sherlock.”

Mycroft looks briefly startled at this frank admission, but then his face shutters closed. He stills John’s hand, which is already putting pen to paper.

“Anything?” he asks softly.

John stops. He straightens up, heart suddenly pounding. “I won’t be made to choose between him and Mary,” he states baldly. “I won’t protect one at the expense of the other. That cuts both ways, do you understand?”

Mycroft nods, a glimmer of what might be irritation—or what might just be respect—flickering in his eyes. “Very well. I won’t ask you to do that.”

He doesn’t quite remove his hand from John’s arm, though, and after a moment John understands.

“No one else is to hurt her either,” he says. His voice is hard as steel. “I know you don’t care about her. I know you don’t care about me, or you’d have told me who she was right away—I know you knew, don’t pretend. But your feelings don’t matter. If I’m to look after Sherlock Holmes, you have to look after Mary. We’re a package deal, the three of us—Sherlock Holmes and John Watson and Mary Watson. 

“And the baby?” Mycroft’s face betrays nothing.

“And the baby, of course, the baby goes without saying.”

“Nothing goes without saying, John,” Mycroft says quietly, and adds a few lines to the contract.

John signs, swallowing back a wave of fear, and turns to go.

“John,” Mycroft calls, when he’s halfway to the car.

John turns back. 

“I didn’t tell you about Mary because I do care about you,” Mycroft says, and then slides into his own car, disappearing from view, and John stares, shocked, at the empty space the elder Holmes brother left behind.

 

 

 

Sherlock’s mouth is on John, and John is staring at the ceiling, and everything is quiet and dark now that the nightmare is over. John loves a woman with an impenetrable past and a man with an impenetrable mind. He’s about to become a father, and somewhere out in the world, Moriarty is on the move. He buries his hands in Sherlock’s hair, closes his eyes, and lets the sensation wash through him.

“Sherlock,” he breathes.

Sherlock makes a noise, impossibly tender, a noise which he’d never admit to in the light of day. John loves it.

In the light of day, he’ll return to Mary, who will kiss him too, who will, for some reason John may never grasp, continue to want him no matter how tightly Sherlock has wound himself around his heart. And he wants her too—wants her mysteries, just as he wants Sherlock’s—and maybe that’s why this works, because the two people he love have both got mysteries, blank spaces, gaps that need to be filled. Maybe they both have chasms somewhere deep inside them, and maybe John can do something about that.

They’ll never really be whole, any of them, not given who they are and what they’ve been through, but John is more than willing to keep slotting the puzzle pieces together, to keep stopping up the gaps. Probably, he thinks, threading his fingers through Sherlock’s hair, that’s what he was made for.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on [tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/ebparentheses) too.


End file.
